Seed to Harvest

by Octavia E. Butler

  Eli stood up, took her hands, and drew her to her feet. Her hands tingled, almost burned where he touched her. Confused, she tried to pull away, but somehow her desire to pull away did not reach her hands. They did not move.

  “Be still,” he said. “I just went through this with your father. His organisms ‘knew’ something mine want to know. So do yours.”

  That made no sense to her, but she did not care. She was not being hurt. She did not think she would have noticed if he had hurt her. She was still trying to understand that her father was dead. Eli kept talking. Eventually, she found herself listening to him.

  “When we’ve changed,” he said, “when the organism ‘decides’ whether or not we’re going to live, it shares the differences it’s found in us with others who have changed. At least that’s what we’ve decided it’s doing. We had a woman who had had herself sterilized before we got her—had her tubes cauterized. Her organisms communicated with Meda’s and her tubes opened up. She’s pregnant now. We had a guy regrow three fingers he’d lost years ago. You … There’s no precedent for it, but I think you may be getting rid of your leukemia. Or maybe the organism’s even found a way to use leukemia to its advantage—and yours. You’re going to live.”

  “I should die,” she whispered. “Dad was strong and he died.”

  “You’re not going to die. You look healthier than you did when I met you.”

  “I should die!”

  “Jesus, I’m glad you’re not going to. That makes up for a lot.”

  She said nothing.

  “Kerry?”

  “Don’t call me that!” she screamed.

  “I’m sorry.” He put his arm around her as soon as he could free his hands from hers—as soon as the organisms had finished their communication. How the hell could microorganisms communicate anyway she wondered obscurely.

  Eli answered as though she had asked the question aloud. Perhaps she had. “We exchanged something,” he said. “Maybe chemical signals of some kind. That’s the only answer I can come up with. We’ve talked about it at home and nobody has any other ideas.”

  She did not understand why he was talking on and on about the organism. Did he think she cared? Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the column of smoke from the ranch house and she thought of something she did care about.

  “Eli?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What about Rane?”

  Silence.

  “Eli? Did she get out?”

  More silence.

  “You blew up the house with her inside!”

  “No.”

  “You did! You killed my sister!”

  “Keira!” He turned her, made her face him. “I didn’t. We didn’t.”

  She believed him. She did not understand why she believed so quickly, why watching him speak the words made her know he was telling the truth. She resented believing him.

  “What happened to her?” she demanded. “Where is she?”

  Eli hesitated. “She’s dead.”

  Another one. Another death. Everyone was dead. She was alone.

  “The car people killed her,” Eli said.

  “How could you know that?”

  “Keira, I know. And you know I’m not lying to you.”

  “How could you know she was dead?”

  He sighed. “Baby …” He drew another breath. “They cut her head off, and they threw it out the front door.”

  She broke away from him, stumbled a few steps down the road.

  “I’m sorry,” he said for the third time. “We tried to save all of you. We … we work hard not to lose people in the middle of their conversions.”

  “You’re like our children at that stage,” another voice said.

  She looked up, saw that a young oriental man had come over the hill behind her.

  The man spoke to Eli. “I came to see if you needed help. I guess not.”

  Eli shrugged. “Take her back to the camp. I’ll bring her father.”

  The man took Keira’s arm. “I knew your sister,” he said softly. “She was a strong girl.”

  Not strong enough, Keira thought. Not against the car family. Not against the disease. Not strong at all.

  She started to follow the new man back to the ranch house, then stopped. She had forgotten something—something important. It must have been important if it could bother her now. Then she remembered.

  “Eli?” she said.

  He was bending over her father. He straightened when she spoke.

  “Eli, someone got away. The hauler who hit my father. He was headed north.”

  “It was a private hauler?”

  “Yes. He got out and tried to rob my father. My father scratched him.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Eli whispered. He sounded almost the way her father had at the end. Then he turned and spoke to the other man. “Steve, tell Ingraham. He’s our best driver. Give him some grenades. Tell him no holds barred.”

  The man called Steve went leaping up the slope as agilely as Jacob could have.

  “Jesus,” Eli repeated. Somehow, he managed to lift her father and carry him back as though he were merely wounded, not half-crushed. He had fashioned a kind of sack of his shirt. Keira walked beside him, hardly noticing when a car sped by down on the highway.

  Up the hill, Steve—Stephen Kaneshiro, he told her—joined her again. He brought her food and she ate ravenously, guiltily. Apparently nothing would disturb her appetite.

  Stephen kept her away from the ruin of the house. He stayed with her, silent but somehow comforting. He found an empty car and sat with her in it. Eli’s people had apparently driven away or killed all of the second, uncontaminated group of car people. Now they were cleaning up. Some were digging a mass grave. Others were loading their newly appropriated cars and trucks with whatever they thought their enclave could use.

  “Take a couple of radios,” Stephen told a woman who passed near them. “I think for a change we’ll be needing them.”

  The woman nodded and went away.

  Jacob found Stephen and Keira sitting together in the car. Without a word, he climbed into Keira’s lap and fell asleep. She stroked his hair, accepting his presence and his youth and thinking nothing. It was possible to endure if she thought nothing at all.

  Sometime later, Ingraham returned. He had driven all the way to the edge of Needles, but found no private hauler. Everyone had gathered near him to hear about his chase. When they had heard, they all looked at Eli.

  Eli closed his eyes, rubbed a hand over his face. “All right.” He spoke so softly, Keira would not have heard him without her newly enhanced hearing. “All right, we knew it would happen sooner or later.”

  “But a private hauler,” Stephen said. “They go all over the country, all over the continent. And they deal with people who go all over the world.”

  Eli nodded bleakly. He looked years older and agonizingly weary.

  “What are we going to do?” Ingraham asked.

  Meda answered him. “What do you think we’re going to do? We’re going home!”

  Eli put his arm around her. “That’s right,” he said. “In a few months we’ll be one of the few sane enclaves left in the country—maybe in the world.” He shook his head. “Use your imagination. Think of what it will be like in the cities and towns.” He paused, reached down and picked up Zera, who had sat at his feet and was leaning sideways against his right leg. “Remember the kids,” he said softly. “They’ll need us more than ever now. Whatever you do, remember the kids.”

  Epilogue

  STEPHEN KANESHIRO WAITED UNTIL he began to hear radio reports of the new illness. Then he put on his gloves and drove with Ingraham into Barstow. From there, by phone, he tried to locate his wife and son. He had been with Keira until then, had seemed content with her, but he felt he had a duty to bring his wife and son to relative safety, though they must have given him up for dead long ago.

  Eli warned him that no one knew what effect the disease might have on a y
oung child. Stephen understood, but he wanted to give his family what he felt might be their only chance.

  He could not. It took him two days of anonymous, sound-only phoning to discover that his wife had gone back to her parents and recently had returned with them to Japan.

  He came back to the mountaintop ranch and Keira. Her hair was growing in thick and dark. She was pregnant—perhaps by Stephen, perhaps from her one night with Eli. Stephen did not seem to care which any more than she did.

  “Will you stay with me?” she asked him. He was a good man. He had helped her through the terrible time after the deaths of her father and sister. He did not excite her as Eli had. She had not known how much she cared for him, how much she needed him until he went away. When he came back, all she could think was: No wife! Thank God! Then she was ashamed. Sometime later she asked the question.

  “Will you stay with me?”

  They sat in their room next to the nursery. Their room in Meda’s house. He sat on the bed and she on the desk chair where she could not touch him. She could not bear to touch him until she knew he did not plan to leave her.

  “We’ll have to cut ourselves off even more than we have so far,” he said. “I brought new weapons, ammunition, and foods we can’t raise. I think we’re going to have to be self-sufficient for a while. Maybe a long while. You and I couldn’t even have a house. Not enough wood.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “San Francisco is burning,” he continued. “I bought a lot of news printouts in town. We haven’t been getting enough by radio. Fires are being set everywhere. Maybe uninfected people are sterilizing the city in the only way they can think of. Or maybe it’s infected people crazy with their symptoms and the noise and smells and lights. L.A. is beginning to burn, too, and San Diego. In Phoenix, someone is blowing up houses and buildings. Three oil refineries went up in Texas. In Louisiana there’s a group that has decided the disease was brought in by foreigners—so they’re shooting anyone who seems a little odd to them. Mostly Asians, blacks, and browns.”

  She stared at him. He stared back expressionlessly.

  “In New York, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, doctors and nurses have been caught spreading the disease. The compulsion is at work already.”

  She thought of her father, then shook her head, not wanting to think of him. He had been so right, so wrong, and so utterly helpless.

  “Everything will be chaos soon,” Stephen said. “There have been outbreaks in Germany, England, France, Turkey, India, Korea, Nigeria, the Soviet Union. …It will be chaos. Then a new order. Hell, a new species. Jacob will win, you know. We’ll help him. And Jacob thinks uninfected people smell like food.”

  “We’ll have to help him to help ourselves,” she said.

  “We’ll be obsolete, you and me.”

  “They’ll be our children.”

  He lowered his eyes, looked at her belly where her pregnancy was beginning to show. “They’ll be all we have,” he said, “the two of us.” There was a long pause. “I’ve lost everyone, too. Will you stay with me?”

  She nodded solemnly and went to him. They held each other until they could no longer tell which of them was trembling.

  Patternmaster

  Octavia Butler

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Prologue

  RAYAL HAD HIS LEAD wife, Jansee, with him on that last night. He lay beside her in his huge bed, secure, lulled by the peacefulness of the Pattern as it flowed to him. The Pattern had been peaceful for over a year now. A year without a major Clayark attack on any sector of Patternist Territory. A luxury. Rayal had known enough years of fighting to be glad to relax and enjoy the respite. Only Jansee could still find reason for discontent. Her children, as usual.

  “I think tomorrow I’ll send a mute to check on our sons,” she said.

  Rayal yawned. He found her too much like a mute herself in her concern for her young. The two boys, aged twelve and two, were at school in Redhill Sector, 480 kilometers away. She would have gone against custom and kept them near her at the school in Forsyth, their birth sector, if he had let her. “Why bother?” he said. “You’re linked with them. If there was anything wrong with them, you would be the first to realize it. Why send a mute to find out what you already know?”

  “Because I’ll be able to see them through the mute’s memory when he comes back. I haven’t seen either of them for over two years. Not since the youngest was born.”

  Rayal shook his head. “Why do you want to see them?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something … not wrong, but … I don’t know.” He could feel her uneasiness influencing the Pattern, rippling its vast interwoven surface. “Will you let me send a mute?”

  “Send an outsider. He’ll be better able to defend himself if the Clayarks notice him.” Then he smiled. “You should have more children. Perhaps then you would be less concerned for these two.” She was used to his mocking. He had said such things to her before. But this time she seemed to take him seriously. He could feel her attention on him, focused, aware even of his smile, though she could not see him in the darkness.

  “You want me to have children by one of your outsiders?” she asked.

  He looked toward her in surprise, his mind tracing the solemnity of her expression. She was calling his bluff. She should have known better. “By a journeyman, perhaps.”

  “What?”

  “Have them by a journeyman, or at least an apprentice. Not an outsider.”

  “And which … journeyman or apprentice did you have in mind?”

  He turned away from her in annoyance. She was continuing this nonsense to goad him. No other woman in his House would dare to bait him so. Perhaps, for a change, she should not be allowed to get away with it either.

  “Michael will do,” he said quietly.

  “Mich … Rayal!” He enjoyed the indignation in her voice. Michael was a young apprentice just out of school and about ten years Jansee’s junior.

  “You asked me to choose someone for you. I’ve chosen Michael.”

  She thought about that for a while, then retreated. But her pride did not allow her to retreat far. “Someday when you promote Michael to journeyman and he can hear me without embarrassment, I’m going to tell him about this.” She laid a hand alongside his face. “Then, husband, if you still insist that you will give me no more children, I will accept your choice.”

  This was, he realized, as much a promise as a threat. She meant it. He reached for her, pulled her closer to him. “It’s for your own good that I refuse you. You’re really too much the mute-mother to have more children. You care too much what happens to them.”

  “I care.”

  “And they’re going to kill each other. You’re so strong that even your child by a weaker man might be able to compete with our two sons.”

  “They wouldn’t have to kill each other.”

  He gave a mental shrug. “Didn’t I have to kill two brothers and a sister to get where I am? Won’t at least some of my children and yours be as eager to inherit power as I was?” He felt her try to pull away from him and knew that he had won a point. He held her where she was. “Two brothers and a sister,” he repeated. “And it could easily have been two sisters if my strongest sister had not been wise enough to ally herself with me and become my lead wife.”

  Now he let her go, but she lay still where she was. The Pattern rippled with her sorrow. It reflected her emotions almost as readily as it did his own. But unless he cooperated, it would not respond to her control. He spoke again to her gently.

  “Even our sons will compete with each other. That will be difficult enough for you to watch, if it happens during your lifetime.”

  “But what about your other
children,” she said. “You have so many by other wives.”

  “And I’ll have more. I don’t have your sensitivity. Those of my children who don’t compete to succeed me will live to contribute to the people’s strength.”

  She was silent for a long while, her awareness focused on his face. “Would you really have tried to kill me if I had opposed you or refused you?”

  “Of course. On your own, you might have become a threat to me.”

  There was more silence, then, “Do you know why I allied with you instead of contesting?”

  “Yes. Now I do.”

  She went on as though she had not heard him. “I hate killing. We have to kill Clayarks just to survive. I can do that. But we don’t have to kill each other.”

  Rayal jerked the Pattern sharply and Jansee jumped, gasping at the sudden disturbance. It was comparable physically to a painless but startling slap in the face.

  “You see?” he said. “I’ve just awakened several thousand Patternists by exerting no more effort than another person might use to snap his fingers. Sister-wife, that is power worth killing for.”

  Jansee radiated sudden anger. She thought of her sons fighting and her mind filled with bitter things to say about his power. But the pointlessness of verbalizing them to him, of all people, undermined her anger. “Not to me,” she said sadly, “and I hope not to my sons. Let them save their savagery, their power, for the Clayarks.” She paused. “Have you noticed the group of mutes outside in front of the House?”

  This was not the change of subject that it seemed to be. He knew what she was leading up to but he let her go. “Yes.”

  “They’ve come a long way,” she said.

  “You can let them in if you like.”

  “I will, later, when they’ve finished their prayers.” She shook her head. “Hajji mutes. Poor fools.”

  “Jansee …”

  “They’ve come here because they think you’re a god, and you won’t even bother to let them in out of the cold.”